The 1715 Treasure Fleet

Part One · The Fleet

In the summer of 1715, Spain needed its treasure home.

War had drained the Spanish crown, and for years the silver of the New World had piled up in colonial ports waiting for safe passage. That July, two fleets sailed together from Havana: the New Spain flota under Captain-General Juan Esteban de Ubilla, carrying the silver of Mexico, and the Tierra Firme squadron under Don Antonio de Echeverz, carrying the gold of South America. Together they made a combined fleet of Spanish galleons plus one French ship, the Grifon, loaded with registered treasure worth millions of pesos, along with contraband riches that never appeared on any manifest.

They left Havana in late July, sailing north along the Bahama Channel, the maritime highway between Florida's east coast and the Bahama banks. It was late in the season, and every sailor aboard knew what late summer in those waters could bring.

Part Two · The Storm

On the last night of July, the wind began to rise.

In the early hours of July 31, 1715, a hurricane caught the fleet strung out along the Florida coast. One by one the ships were driven into the shallows and torn apart on the reefs, from roughly present-day Sebastian down past Fort Pierce. Of the treasure ships, none survived: only the Grifon, sailing a different course, escaped. Hundreds of sailors and passengers drowned. More than a thousand survivors crawled ashore onto a wild coast, building driftwood camps while officers salvaged what they could from the wreckage in the surf.

Spain mounted salvage operations for years, recovering a portion of the registered treasure from the shallows, and word of the wrecks drew privateers and freebooters from across the Caribbean. Then the sea moved its sand back over the rest, and the fleet slept.

Part Three · The Treasure Coast

For two and a half centuries, the fleet was a rumor.

Then, in the mid-twentieth century, treasure began washing up again. After storms, beachwalkers near Sebastian found blackened silver coins in the sand. A building contractor named Kip Wagner traced them to the sea, and the salvage company he formed with a small crew of divers, the Real Eight Company, began recovering silver and gold from the 1715 wrecks in the 1960s. The finds made national news, and Florida's east coast from Sebastian to Fort Pierce has been called the Treasure Coast ever since.

Generations of explorers have worked these wrecks in the decades since, from Mel Fisher's crews to the divers and researchers honored in our own museum: Carl Fismer, who salvaged on the 1715 fleet across his long career, and Jack Haskins, whose archival research in Seville helped modern explorers understand what was lost and where. To this day, after the right storm, the 1715 fleet still gives up coins to the beaches of the Treasure Coast. Much of what sank in 1715 has never been found.

A short account of events documented in Spanish colonial records and the published histories of the 1715 fleet and its modern salvors.